Discover your self-leadership

Module One

The individual LI Profile

Enables you to understand the interplay between your emotional responses, the actions you take and the responses you elicit in others. Based on the results of your answers to an in-depth questionnaire a skilled team of analysts prepare two reports.

Together these form The LI Profile:

• The Personal Report illuminates your patterns of engagement, your coping strategies and the core values that drive you
• The Work Resume focuses on anchoring your understanding of how you operate at home and work which helps to establish how your organisation can most benefit from working with you

Reading the Personal Report, you first decide what rings true for you. Then, with your consultant you work to amplify the meaning, make connections, use memories and associations – going from ‘what happened back then’ to the core of what is ‘happening right now’. The impact of the personal one-to-one conversations is proven to be as important as the construction and accuracy of the reports. They go beyond simply coaching and problem solving; instead helping you understand the fundamental ways you operate.

Developing emotional awareness is key to your leadership identity. It addresses your capacity to deal with unknown and uncertain, often complex situations that require flexible, resilient coping strategies, new adaptive and sometimes higher levels of thinking and action.

The new awareness becomes an invaluable pointer in helping you to comprehend what is happening to you – not some while later but as it happens, in the heat of the action. You are in control and are able to act responsibly.

In contrast, with a less aware response: you forfeit much of your potential and become victim to your pre-programming. You repeat past patterns of engagement and, as a result, the scene may play out in familiar, but ineffective and possibly even quite damaging ways.

Life cannot be compartmentalised. Essentially you are the same person in private or work-life. Awareness helps you recognise what really matters, moods or attitudes – so you are in a position to take personal responsibility for your own actions.

Part of the role of the Consultant is to slow you down, creating an environment and the space for you to reflect and ask yourself fundamental questions about your choices and behaviours. Crucially the consultant supports you to identify and connect with your underlying patterns – so you become more in charge of the difficult areas in your life, more aware of your own reactions, increasing your ability to react intuitively, wisely, in a timely way.

Moving on to your second report, The Work Résumé establishes your ‘Imperatives’, the interpersonal and task drivers of your attitude to progressing work. The further self-management guidelines on building working alliances include effective approaches to handling difference with key colleagues as well as development options round the priorities you wish to address. Your consultant will guide you through the process of applying your increased emotional acumen to achieving your goals, being resilient in your public role, leading yourself effectively so that you are able to offer sound leadership and advice to others.

Module Two

The Leadership Insight Intensive

This takes personal development into the collective sphere. The five-day master classes are in a group environment. They enable you to experience the impact of your behavioural patterns on others and vice versa how you understand other people.

During the Intensive you have an opportunity to experiment with different roles: the client, consultant, observer, allowing you to use what you have learnt in different contexts. The Intensive acts as a living lab, allowing you to experience the challenges of work in a safe and nurturing group with space to experiment and explore.

Bringing your increased awareness and acumen to bear, the Intensive can:

• Enable you to confront interactions below the surface – where people cannot communicate or tend to misinterpret each other’s motivations and thinking
• Enhance your grasp of interpersonal dynamics and cooperation; you will be better able to handle work relations, negotiations, appraisals…
• Show you how you might choose to act in real-time work and leadership roles

The LI Intensive introduces the conditions for the necessary self-leadership necessary for participants to influence and lead others in a sustainable way.

Module Three

Culture change

In the past response to the need for organisational change was often met by re-organisation –mostly large-scale restructuring. Issues of process were majorly ignored. There is a new emphasis emerging of creating change through interaction between people. This coaching strategy of organisational transformation merges ‘soft and hard’ methods. LI offers consultancy to the leader as coach/facilitator and to organisation-wide transformation.

Consultancy to you in role as Leader-Coach & Facilitator

• Team development: you may wish to build up the LI approach to organisational change now or at a later point when comfortable with LI yourself
• Your awareness and resilience energises the team and organisation as a whole to take purposeful action: you roll out the skills for the development of manager-facilitators

Changing the leadership landscape using the LI approach to:

Module Four

Life-enhancing Leadership Programmes

After starting your LI journey, you may like to explore becoming a qualified LI Associate Consultant or join other programmes. Both are run in partnership with The Recess College which is committed to providing on-going personal development and experiential learning for LI consultants. Recess programmes include ‘The Senior Sabbaticals’; for young professionals ‘Our Future Leaders’. The school version, ‘Future Leaders’ is for sixteen-year olds on personal self-development and community in the work-world.